On the Generalizability of Motion Models for Road Users in Heterogeneous Shared Traffic Spaces

Modeling mixed-traffic motion and interactions is crucial to assess safety, efficiency, and feasibility of future urban areas. The lack of traffic regulations, diverse transport modes, and the dynamic nature of mixed-traffic zones like shared spaces make realistic modeling of such environments challenging. This paper focuses on the generalizability of the motion model, i.e., its ability to generate realistic behavior in different environmental settings, an aspect which is lacking in existing works. Specifically, our first contribution is a novel and systematic process of formulating general motion models for pedestrians and cars, and application of this process is to extend our Game-Theoretic Social Force Model (GSFM) towards a general model for generating a large variety of motion behaviors of pedestrians and cars from different shared spaces. Our second contribution is to consider different motion patterns of pedestrians and cars by calibrating motion-related features of individual road users and clustering them into groups. We analyze three clustering approaches. The calibration and evaluation of our model are performed on three different shared space data sets. The results indicate that our model can realistically simulate a wide range of motion behaviors and interaction scenarios, and that model performance improves by considering heterogeneity in road users’ motion.